Off the Canadian Arctic coast, an archipelago of islands is rapidly losing the sheets of ice that once blanketed them. A group of scientists today published a long-range study of what this means, and documented the changing landscape.

These images capture a place that hasn't existed before, nor will it in the future - it is a landscape in flux, between a world frozen in ice and a world gushing with melt. We have a gallery.

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In Nature, the authors sum up the situation:

Repeat airborne laser altimetry surveys have been used to estimate that the glaciers of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) lost 23 gigatonnes per year of ice between spring 1995 and spring 2000. This represents 0.063 mm per year of sea-level rise . . . Since 2000 the CAA has experienced some of the warmest summer temperatures on record, with four of the five warmest years since 1960 occurring after 2004. Between 2005 and 2009 all CAA glaciers with long-term monitoring programmes experienced their most negative five-year period ofsurface mass budget since measurements began in the early 1960s.

Essentially, we are witnessing just one aspect of the polar melts that are predicted to raise sea level by a meter over the next century.

Date: August, 2008
Credit: Alex Gardner
Description: Areal view of the Sverdrup Glacier, a river of ice that flows from the interior of the Devon Island Ice Cap into the ocean. Nunavut, Canada. Flow stripes are clearly visible on the surface of the glacier.